Wanted: Backbones for Bureaucrats

(Gregg Phillips) – Very soon, career bureaucrats will finally have an opportunity to demonstrate the strength of their collective backbones.

Decades of hiding behind regulations, rules and fat budgets are crashing down.

A half century of expanding social programs – Medicaid, food stamps, social security and more – have finally pushed states to their absolute limits.

We employ unprecedented numbers of employees in the public sector. It’s as if government has become a giant jobs program.

Bureaucrats of all stripes now have an opportunity to stand tall with a firm backbone and do the right thing. They must burst the bubble that is government employment. They must not force doctors, nurses, nursing homes, hospitals, and others to bear the brunt of their likely capitulation to state and federal employee unions. Meanwhile critical public functions — schools, law enforcement and public safety are left struggling.

Sadly, the chance to stand tall for taxpayers and future generations will pass them by while waste, fraud and abuse continue to drain the pool.

In 2008, one of the spineless bureaucrats about which I write said, “…it’s a new day. We are not interested in cost savings any longer.” Really – should we not always be interested in savings?

Tea party folks and conservatives delivered a strong message in November to the President and Congress. It seems Obama is growing a backbone as is evidenced by his new found support for the American people, jobs, and lower taxes.

The people who run these agencies who will be tasked with “saving money” are often way left of center, rarely right of moderate and almost always protective of the workers and their jobs.

Budget deficits in many states are so bad that there is now a compelling need to cut through the flesh of the bureaucracy and into the bone. It will not be pretty.

Let us all now stand together and see whether the spineless do the unthinkable, yet do what must be done – burst the government employee bubble.